A solid-state cyclic image recording device which has a layered structure consisting of a conductive transparent substrate, a thin photoconductive layer, a thin deformable elastomer layer and a deformable electrode such as a thin flexible metal layer has been disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,716,359. When an electric field is placed between the conductive substrate and the deformable electrode, the elastomer will deform into a diffracting surface relief pattern corresponding to the image light distribution of an image focused on the photoconductive layer. Light modulated by the deformation of the elastomer surface can be converted to an intensity distribution similar to the original image by means of a simple Schleiren optics system. As described in the article "The Ruticon Family of Erasable Image Recording Devices", N. K. Sheridon, IEEE Transitions on Electron Devices, ED-19, September 1972, pages 1003 to 1010, the image recording device, modified to incorporate a Rochi ruling on the conductive substrate before the photoconductive layer and referred to in the article as a Ruticon, may be utilized as an optical buffer storage device. The optical buffer storage device may be utilized in a word processing system to temporarily store information thereon. For example, in text editing systems commercially available, information to be printed as hard copy is first displayed on a display device, such as a cathode ray tube, in a manner whereby corrections to a line of text, for example, can be made to the information displayed prior to its reproduction in hard copy. A feature of text editing systems is that selected portions of the display can be edited. In the image recording device described in the aforementioned patent, selective erasive, or editing, of the image formed thereon has not been achieved. The entire image formed on the prior art cyclic image recording device of the type described hereinabove is erased by flooding the photoconductive layer with light or removing the field across the elastomer. Obviously, complete, instead of selective, erasure of the image is a device characteristic which substantially eliminates the usefulness of the device in a text editing sytem. Method and apparatus for enabling selective erasure of the image is disclosed in copending application Ser. No. 650,825. filed, Jan. 21, 1976 by Jan S. Snyder and Clark I. Bright. Positive images which are projected from the device are white characters on a dark background. In many applications it is necessary to provide an output display which has dark characters on a light background (negative image) which has high contrast between characters. Although the aforementioned copending application discloses technique for obtaining dark characters on a light background by adjusting the readout optics, the contrast of the negative image thus produced is less than satisfactory. It would therefore be desirable if the aforementioned system would have the capability of providing a high contrast negative image in addition to the normally obtained high contrast positive image. Method and apparatus for providing high contrast negative images is disclosed in copending application Ser. No. 650,826, filed Jan. 21, 1976 by Jan S. Snyder and Clark I. Bright. However, the utilization of a short circuit in the process described therein reduces the image contrast to some extent.